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Last night’s dream - 14.3.13

I was walking through a shared garden behind a number of blocks of flats. It had become a forgotten patch of grass on the estate that was probably just used as a cut-through by this point. A fence partitioned part of the space, and had various tags from different graffiti writers. As I carried on walking there were a number of letters sprayed on the floor, spelling out ‘IAN PURVIS IS NOT DEAD’.

Obviously this meant almost nothing to me, but threw my mind into an investigative spiral that presented me with testimonials of people from the area and snapshots of stock footage from Ian Purvis’ life. He was a teenage boy of Jamaican descent, who was talented at football. Whilst scenes of him doing kick ups played out I could hear the rumours from people in the local area, claiming that his death had been falsified by the police, and that a conspiracy had grown out of the community.

The ‘murder’ scene had been left exactly as it was on the day; a pair of jogging bottoms on the floor next to a door with smashed glass around the bottom panel. 

At this point I woke up. It was about 4 in the morning and, naturally, I Googled ‘Ian Purvis’. 

He’s the CE of a PR company in Newbury. 

We’re not obsessed with technology, we just live with it.

Travelling into London everyday, it’s easy to believe that we’re all obsessed with technology. Train carriages filled with people gazing deeply into screens, ignoring the world outside the window, and their fellow passengers. Social situations are increasingly interrupted by smart phone interventions, and we continue to teach ‘bots’ how to perform more complex tasks. People are very rarely seen without a device of some sort, and our homes are filled with furniture that is slowly becoming connected. We’ve moved this ‘always on’ mentality forward, accepting that we will always be with our devices, through wearable tech. Products like the Nike Fuel band and Google Glass encourage us to spend all of our time with technology, as they help us perform everyday tasks. 

Despite all this, wearable technology suggests a turning point. We’ve lived with technological devices (in the modern sense) for a few decades now, our infatuation pushing research and development into rapid growth. And that’s exactly my point. We used to be obsessed with technology. We didn’t know what the internet was when it was first introduced, but a handful of people thought it could be cool and played with it for a few years. It was a time when our idea of technology was placed far into the future, when life would be different, and we would have jetpacks. 

Now, we’re comfortable with it. We accept that certain technologies are all around us and - on the whole - they make life a little bit easier. It’s easy to criticise the screen-folk and say that they’re passively staring into a glowing rectangle, but this suggests that they aren’t actually doing anything. When we’re in our techno-trance, we’re busy. We could be searching, watching, reading, talking, playing; but either way we’re doing something. We’re no longer obsessed with the technology as objects, but instead we’re constantly using them as tools to facilitate connectivity and communication. And this makes me think of Patrick Burgoyne’s talk that I mentioned previously, “Everything changes, everything stays the same”. As humans, all we’ve ever really cared about were tools and communication. They’re the things that make us different, the things that help us grow, and that has never really changed. 

Whether or not this slow acceptance of ubiquitous connectivity is a good thing is a completely different argument. Either way it seems to me that we are not just looking at screens and fetishising gadgets any more, but starting to look through them instead.

“Everything changes, everything stays the same”

Cowbird was a two-day symposium put together by my old university in Norwich, in memory of Nic Hughes. Guests were invited to talk about Graphic Design (design, graphics, visual communication, whatever you want to call it) in a world where digital and analogue communication channels are available to us simultaneously, separately, and at the same time. 

The spectrum of skills brought to the table by the speakers gives an indication of the ambition of the symposium, and as a result I’ll list them all in full:

Hamish Muir - Outcast Editions, 8vo
Craig Oldham - Design by Music
Vivian Rosenthal - Goldrun
Tom Roope - The Rumpus Room
Michael C. Place - Build
Matt Ward - DWFE
Denise Wilton - Berg
Patrick Burgoyne - Creative Review
Andy Stevens - Graphic Thought Facility
Vera-Maria Glahn - Field
All excellently chaired by Adrian Shaughnessy.

As a result of this roster the audience went through a mix of awe, inspiration, knowledge and probably a little bit of fear.

It was nice to see a collection of talks that, despite their different subject matter, were sensitive to the context of the symposium and as such linked to one another in some way. Whether or not this was intentional, I’m not sure, but there were definitely themes that appeared as the days played out.

Hamish Muir talked about the point at which a job is at the printers as being the most important part of a project, because of how much of the outcome is decided by this part of the process. And Tom Roope talked about moderation in the same way. In some of his projects where UGC played a central role, the part where the work is “made” is essentially out of the designers hands. Craig Oldham pointed out that the book is itself a piece of technology that changed the world, just in the same way as we see it’s role being changed by different technology today. This was echoed by Patrick Burgoyne on day two, (the quote at the beginning of this post was the title of his talk) as he looked at the changes Creative Review has faced, and introduced, during his time as editor. 

There are so many things that I could comment on, and so many excellent quotes from all of the speakers, but it would be far to exhaustive to document them all here. It was a very well put together symposium with a theme that showed the direction design can, and probably will go. The stories were thought provoking, and the work was exciting, each revealing a different approach to visual communication in an ever-connected world.

Personally, I’d like to thank Andy Campbell for putting the pieces together and, of course, Nic Hughes. I think he would have really enjoyed Cowbird.

I haven’t added much to the internet recently.

Simon Jefferis and I are 5 months into our internship together at Dare and are starting to think about what’s going to happen next. We’ve worked on a number of projects in the “real world” that NUA prepared us for, and Dare has certainly taken us out of our comfort zones and into some testing situations. The demands of paying clients are (obviously) very different to those of a degree course, and trying to keep a relaxed approach to new projects is more challenging when results are needed within days rather than weeks. Despite this, we’re working with a large number of very talented people that have pushed us and moved our ideas towards fruition quicker than we have ever experienced, and this has helped us push personal projects further in our spare time as well.

Commuting to London is a completely different bag of crazy. I love the Underground for what it is, but I don’t want to have to travel on that thing for the rest of my life. Perhaps we’ll move to London next, or maybe the Nor-folk were right and you don’t have to be there at all. Either way working in the city is a good experience right now and it seems to be teaching us a lot.

I thought 2012 would be a year of massive change, if only for myself. I think 2013 will be a year of big decisions, and some of them are coming up faster than expected. They probably always do that. Here’s to making the right ones.

I just put together a logo and poster for my brother-in-law who is a personal trainer hoping to get some new clients this year. 

Looking to throw up and maybe poo a little bit? That’s what it takes to reach those resolution goals and Mitch is your man.

It’s been a while…but things are happening.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working with Simon and Jason on a couple of short films about two small charities. We had to head to Calibre Audio Library in Aylesbury, where they produce audio books for people with visual impairments, and then to a Magic Breakfast at Leigh School in Birmingham. It’s been great fun and nice to be working on projects that take us to different places. 

It’s also been great to look over Jason’s shoulder as he was working on other projects because his films are awesome.